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Le roman L’Étranger, écrit par Titus Popovici en 1955 sur un événement tragique survenu en Transylvanie en 1944, est remonté, en même temps que son sujet, à la surface de la mémoire collective dans les années quatre-vingt, illustrant la persistance de l’antagonisme magyaro-roumain. Pourtant, le rôle du livre et de son auteur, de ses contempteurs et de ses détracteurs ne sont pas nécessairement ceux que l’on attend.
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This paper traces the international history of Eastern Europe in the 20th century within the analytical framework of the national self-determination/independence paradigm. It argues that in 1918 the allied powers dissolved the Austro-Hungarian Monarchy in the hope that the newly established nation states would strengthen European stability and would balance Russian and German power. The Munich agreement was not a mistake but a conscious effort to reorganize the continent on a more stable basis after it turned out that the international system created for middle Europe in Paris was not working. Thereafter Great Britain strove to achieve continental balance by surrendering the region to German, later to Soviet hegemony. This would also be the policy of the United States until 1948 when the Truman administration decided that the restoration of national independence in Eastern Europe would create a safer Europe. After the failure of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution the U.S. returned to the position that continental stability took precedence over the independence of the Soviet satellites, a view shared by the major NATO allies. This remained the Western position through 1989. The restoration of national independence and continental reunification originated in Eastern Europe, which for the first time since 1918 was a policy maker in the international arena.
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This study analyzes the puzzle of Hungarian economic drifting in a long run perspective. The underlying puzzle for the investigation is why bad policies are invariably popular and good policies unpopular, thus why political and economic rationality never overlap. The first part of the article summarizes in eight points the basic features of the postwar period. Then six lessons are offered, which might be useful for other countries in transition or for students of comparative economics and politics, lessons that can be generalized on the basis of the individual country experience.
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The period 1945–70 saw a change in the approach to environmental contamination on the part of Polish authorities and the society. Before 1956, the imposed model of economic modernisation, which imitated and reproduced the Soviet patterns, glaringly contradicted the requirements of ecology. In the aftermath of the political turn of 1956, protection of waters and air against pollution finally became a matter of debate involving the authorities and the society. Basic legal solutions in this respect, meant to protect the environment against degradation, were adopted in the 1960s. The legislators generally followed the arguments and reasons behind the period’s industrial policy, with the resulting limited efficiency of the legal acts adopted. In any case, between 1956 and 1970 awareness emerged in the society with respect to threats to the environment. This is attested by the letters sent to the authorities whose authors, individuals and groups, criticised the developments of industrial modernisation – owing, primarily, to its detrimental impact on their health.
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This article seeks to investigate the problem of modernity in post-war communist Poland (People’s Republic of Poland, Pol.: Polska Rzeczpospolita Ludowa, PRL) through the prism of concepts and ideas of model family and possibilities of shaping it, as promoted in the expert discourse and guidance practices. On the interpretation level, it is important to refer to modern – that is, rational and expert knowledgepropelled – social control methods, strictly connected with the concepts or ideas of modern society. The crucial aspect is the tension between biopolitics understood in terms of actions and strategies of modern dictatorship devised to control a population and the concepts of modernity that appeared in expert discourses in the context of, i.a., decreasing natality, modern birth control methods or practices related to maternity/paternity. Analysed are experts’ opinions proving dominant in the discourse, including the arguments put forth at sessions of the Family Council and the Planned Parenthood Association.
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The article is a case study illustrating the process of Stalinization and de-Stalinization of Polish historiography. The issue in question is placed in the context of tradition understood in terms of one’s relation towards historical heritage. An analysis of Stefan Kieniewicz’s historical thought, one of the most distinguished experts on the history of the national uprisings of the post-partitioned era, is hoped to provide significant insights into the process of ideologization and de-ideologization of the Polish historiography of the communist era. While in the Stalinist account of Polish history national uprisings, having been included under the category of ‘progressive traditions’, tended to be equated with Lenin’s idea of agrarian revolution, Kieniewicz’s interpretation – the evolution of which marked the successive stages of the process of de-Stalinization – tended first to replace the Leninist concept with the nineteenth-century idea of social revolution and then to abandon the ‘progressive traditions’ in favour of the ‘reactionary ones’ (the role of Catholicism and the Polish presence in the East). Thus, the Stalinist account of the uprisings understood as the anti-feudal revolutions fostering the rise of ‘capitalism’ and ‘bourgeois nation’ was giving way to an interpretation in which the nineteenth-century armed movements were seen as a national struggle for freedom resulting in the development of Polish national consciousness in the ethnically Polish territories, and in the regression of this consciousness in the eastern lands of the old Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. When approached from the perspective of tradition, these interpretations appear to have aimed at inventing tradition (Stalinism) on one hand and at transforming heritage in a way which preserves its historical meaning on the other.
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The paper examines the problem of Dechristianization and secularization in nineteenth-century Europe, with a special emphasis on the Roman Catholic Church’s ways of reacting to modernity. The first part deals with changes in religious attitudes, on individual and collective levels, in the midst of rapid social and intellectual changes that took place in the nineteenth century. The building of the modern secular state structures was among the most important factors weakening the position of the established churches.The second part of the paper deals with the Roman Catholic Church. The argument of the author is that the Church managed to come to terms with modernity and to escape secularization at the price of supporting modern radical nationalism in the early twentieth century. The Church, especially since the times of Pope Leo XIII, chose to embrace modernity in its conservative form as an alternative to the dominant rationalist-liberal type. It was, nevertheless, a modernity, and the transformations of the Catholic Church throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries should be understood in terms of modernization (although unenthusiastic) rather than resistance to modernity. The problem of Catholic liberalism and the reasons for its rather moderate influence are also discussed.On the whole, Peter Berger was right in saying that ‘modernity is not necessarily secularizing; it is necessarily pluralizing’, that is it creates various possibilities of behaviour that can, but do not have to, lead to secularization.
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First years after the Second World War were very difficult for the health care in Poland. The end of German occupation brought a wide range of challenges. They resulted from war damage, a significant loss of medical staff and a large scale of health risks. One of important goals of the health policy was to create the public health service available to all citizens. Initially, the restoration of the health care system was based on the model created in the interwar period. With time, along with political changes taking place in Poland, the transformation of the system began to adapt it to the centrally planned economy. The main part of this process ended in 1950. The new system was compatible with the Soviet model and was based on central and directive management which included all elements of the so-called “social health service”. The private medical practice was pushed to the margin and insurance health service was taken over by the state. The system built after the war, however, was still not widespread. Most of the rural population, which represented nearly half of the country`s population, were deprived of equal access to health care.
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In post-war Czechoslovakia, the re-organisation of public health care was closely linked to problems and new challenges in organising the academic education in medicine and medical science. Reforms in this area were seen as one of the basic starting points of health care reforms whose aim was to improve the health care and health of the population. Alongside elements such as the nationalisation of health care system, the system at this time focused not only on curative but also preventive medicine and hygiene. Similar trends were at that time in evidence in other countries of the then forming Soviet Bloc.In the early 1950s, medical faculties were in some countries of the Soviet Bloc (Poland, Hungary) removed from the structure of traditional universities and transformed into medical academies. These medical academies were supposed to take over the existing functions of academic faculties of medicine and provide teaching, research, and curative medicine, but newly also preventive care. In other countries (Czechoslovakia, GDR), medical faculties remained part of both the traditional and newly established universities, though their transformation into medical academies had also been discussed.The contribution includes: 1. a brief description of the network of academic medical education in 1945–1950s in countries of the Soviet Bloc (Soviet Union, Czechoslovakia, GRD, Poland, and Hungary); 2. analysis of reasons why in Czechoslovakia the transformation of faculties into academies was not carried out, while in other countries it was. These reasons include references to the strength of tradition, factual arguments, or ideologically based argumentation pointing to “Soviet models”.
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In 1956 the communist state authorities liberalized the anti-abortion law that the Polish People’s Republic inherited from the interwar period. Using the rhetoric of women’s health and framing their decision as a safety measure, the legislators intended to curb the high number of clandestine abortion procedures performed outside the realm of socialist medicine. As I argue in my paper, in the official political and medical discourse abortion legislation passed in Poland in the 1950s constituted an element of the war against traditional medicine which was waged by the authorities of socialist Poland. One of the targets of this fight were “granny midwives”: traditional folk female healers who were helping peasant women in many aspects of their reproductive lives and who were customarily accused of performing high numbers of criminal abortions. Thus it was against these “granny midwives” that the socialist state had to fight over the life and health of Polish women. Presenting abortion as an intricate medical procedure whose success depended on the skills of a highly qualified and experienced personnel, socialist doctors and authorities did not only medicalise abortion, but also pathologised it, depicting the termination of a pregnancy as a disease requiring the care of a professional medical practitioner. What was also at stake at the fight against “granny midwives” was the shift from pre-modern, traditional healing practices to modern, scientific medicine that was regarded as a tenet of state socialism.
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History of prostitution is both a fascinating and a controversial topic. Yet, it still has not been thoroughly researched by historians, especially when it comes to the postwar history of Poland. The purpose of his article is to deepen our understanding of prostitution in the postwar Poland. To achieve that the author has analysed the language used by the Civic Militia (Polish: Milicja Obywatelska) to describe this phenomenon in the 1960s. Both the methods of historical source analysis and historical sociology are used to accomplish that. The sources include written orders, reports and notes produced by the Civic Militia officers and stored in the Police archives. Furthermore, the professional journals such as the Służba MO have been carefully researched to observe the development of a specific expert discourse on prostitution. The language of these texts turns out to be deeply rooted in the traditional vision of female sexuality. On the other hand, the sources show a visible change in the Civic Militia’s attitude towards prostitution and the professionalisation of its operations.
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At first glance, the Catholic identity of a Cardinal should not be a complicated topic, particularly if we are dealing with a person who became one of the most famous symbols of Catholic resistance against communism during the Cold War Era. In the 1950s Cardinal József Mindszenty was regarded as one of the most prominent martyrs of the Catholic Church. This reputation emerged again in the early 1970s all over the world, particularly in North and South America, but also in Western Europe, Austria, and Germany. He was arrested, put on trial in 1949, imprisoned, allegedly tortured, was freed during the revolution of 1956, and spent the next 15 years of his life as an exile in the U. S. Embassy in Budapest. He died only four years later, in 1975, in his last exile in Vienna. But József Mindszenty, born József Pehm in 1892, stood also for a very specific understanding of Hungarian Catholicism: a particularly conservative, anti-liberal, legitimist, pre-Vatican II, reactionary, traditionalist and nationalist Catholicism. In my paper, I look at the case of Cardinal Mindszenty in order to explore the most important aspects and changes of Hungarian Catholic identity during the 20th century. I want to show that, contrary to the common view, most questions regarding Mindszenty and Hungarian Catholicism are still open and require further research.
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The author – inspired by the notion of “phantasm” as proposed by Maria Janion, and using the concepts of, among others, German Ritz (the poetics of inexpressible homosexual desire and “complex of corporality”), Marc Ferro (film as a symptom revealing the “hidden side” of power and society) and Michel Foucault (“arrangement of sexuality”) – examines the attitude of Czechoslovak cinema towards male nudity and sexuality in a broader context of socio-political history and filmmaking in Czechoslovakia after the Second World War. An analysis, centred on two films: the Labakan (The False Prince) by Václav Krška (1956), and Kluci z bronzu (Boys of Bronze) by Stanislav Strnad (1980), is to comparatively examine how homosexual phantasms were sublimated and transferred to the screen in two historical moments – in the second half of the fifties, i.e. when the country was going out of the Stalinist and socialist realism period, and at the turn of the eighties, that is in the middle of the period of normalization and the regime of Gustáv Husák. The main purpose of the analysis is to examine a symptomatic change in quality – called by Szymański as “degeneration” – of the way in which homosexual imaginations were disclosed and functioned in films, that reflected their appropriation, “reorientation” and exploitation by the totalitarian authorities. In the rich literary, dramatic and film achievements of Krška we find many homosexual “hidden signals” as well as clear connotations and indications, expressing themselves in, among other things, spectacularization and erotization of the male body, a peculiar construct of protagonists-outsiders, questioning of gender stereotypes, stylisation modelled on antiquity, oriental or expressionistic one, etc. Special place in his creativity is occupied by the Czechoslovak-Bulgarian film super-production titled Labakan (The False Prince), in which the adaptation of the fairy tale about a tailor’s apprentice who wanted to take the place of the vizier’s son became for the director a vehicle for his personal, author’s commentary. The homosexual (homotextual) character of Krška’s film reveals itself in its transgressive plot open to a “double reading”, in its specific pansexuality and the “complex of male corporality”, governed by the logic of covetous look, and in the paracamp aesthetic associated today with queer style. In Szymański’s opinion, the materialization of homosexual phantasms on the screen offered both for the author and the spectators an area of freedom and “artistry of life”: on the one hand it offered them shelter and was an escape from the oppressive cultural reality, on the other – it was becoming the means to contest and the practice of resistance to the heteronormative and totalitarian world. Whereas a barracks-sports farce titled Kluci z bronzu (Boys of Bronze) by Stanislav Strnad belongs to a bigger group of films which in this popular form were taking up the subject of exceptional and unique on the world scale events – Czechoslovak Spartakiads, with their most spectacular part in the form of mass gymnastic compositions performed at the Strahov Stadium in Prague. The fictional history of soldiers, who – overcoming their limitations and reverses of fortune, were preparing a composition of artistic gymnastics for the Spartakiads, was combined with documental shots of the real performing sports compositions at the Strahov in 1980. It inscribes into the normalized film “formats”, that is the tested and “patented” stylistic and genre formulas used by the authorities as “soft” means of propaganda and indoctrination. The way in which Strnad presents military and sport homosocial relations, together with a domination in the film of the element of masculinity and the specific “complex of male corporality”, imply some special interrelation between the erotisation of the male body, ideological directives, and political needs. What is more, according to Szymański, they also indicate that the purpose of the communist authorities was not only the “standard” creation and propagation of “appropriate” models of “real” masculinity, but also such shaping of male corporality and eroticism that they would support the existing political order instead of subverting it, and replicate the normalized “arrangement of sexuality”. In this context the author looks closely at the Spartakiada’s mass gymnastic exercises demon- strated by male gymnasts, and especially at the hugely popular shows performed by almost fourteen thousand of half-naked soldiers, which were an unprecedented in the communist public space celebration of male physicality and sensuality, characterised by special idealisation and aestheticisation, outstanding choreography and spectacular figures of the performers, erotic dialectics of clothes and nudity, and the condensation of tension which was gradually and sophisticatedly built. In these shows, the instrumentalisation of gender and eroticism, characteristic of Spartiakiads in general, was followed by the instrumentalisation of codes of homosexual look and desire, neutralisation of inversive connotations – were harnessed for the use of normalization. Homosexual phantasms which in the time of Krška could have been a stimulant of personal expression and practice of opposition, and at least an internal shelter and refuge, twenty years later were appropriated, manipulated and instrumentalised by the communist authorities, becoming part of their system normalizing procedures, a tool for ordering or “arranging sexuality” in accordance with political lines, and an instrument of self-totalitaring and self-harnessing actions.
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This paper makes an attempt to analyze the mindset of creative Hungarian intellectuals who accepted various influential roles in Stalinist Hungary. It uses contemporary and other Hungarian and non-Hungarian patterns of intellectual behavior as a basis of comparison. The argument is shaped with the help of the conceptual framework of scapegoating.
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“The Impact of 1956 on the Hungarians of Transylvania”, provides a 50-year retrospective analysis of the political consequences of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 on the Hungarians in neighboring Romania. It focuses on the inter-ethnic knock-on effects in the Romanian Workers Party, the “Hungarian/Mures-Hungarian Autonomous Region” of Transylvania, and the cultural institutions of the Hungarian minority. It links these developments to present-day Romanian-Hungarian relations, both on the interstate and the intrastate levels.
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Christian churches both Catholic and Protestant experienced a renewal of their theology and a revival of their impact on society in the interwar period; and they could count on the continuous good will of the conservative Horthy regime. Convinced that the leading role of Jewish intellectuals in the 1918–1919 revolutionary upheaval resulted the near ruin of the traditional society and amidst the shock caused by the collapse of historical Hungary, some leading members of Protestant churches endorsed various forms of political anti-Semitism, including the acceptance of some type of curtailment of religious equality, which had once been acclaimed as a significant achievement of nineteenth-century Protestant liberalism. While maintaining their sympathy for the Horthy regime till the very last, the leaders of the churches opposed the persecution and deportation of Hungarian Jews, which began escalating after March 1944. This paper will discuss some of the possible contexts of the Reformed Church’s public statements concerning the Holocaust after 1945 and will focus mainly on the writings and sermons of the leading figure of the Reformed Church Bishop László Ravasz (1882–1975).
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The fate of East-Central Europe until the fall of the communist regimes was determined by the status quo that the allies set up in 1945. Despite the fact that it has never been formally recorded in any official document, both superpowers, which controlled the bipolar world order after World War II – namely the United States and the Soviet Union – attributed a pivotal role to this tacit agreement in the East- West relationship. Their mutual consent started to work as an automatic rule of thumb in the chilliest years of the Cold War era, and developed afterwards, when the sporadic East-West conflicts needed to be managed. On the basis of this conception, the passivity of the West at the time of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 is not as surprising and incomprehensible as contemporary public opinion in Hungary regarded it. The Hungarian uprising was not merely inconvenient for the western powers but it totally contradicted their policy, which especially after 1955 aimed at a compromise with the Soviet Union through the mutual acquiescence of the existing status quo.
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